Ok. So first off, I apologize for using "leet speak" in the post title. Secondly, I apologize for being away from net access since Tuesday. A lot of people have left comments on my first blogging, and I appreciate it! I'll be trying to get back to all of them and respond in the next day or so.
Good news - picking up a new Laptop tomorrow (today?) morning. And it's a PC! 1.7 Dual Core Pentium (I'd prefer an AMD, but whatever), Brand new fresh copy of Vista - and best news - warranty that's still good until February 22nd, and an extended warranty (an extra year) through the person I'm buying from's Visa card :) WooT! Ok. Here's my quick take on the whole Mac/PC argument, before I get too heavy into "t3h gaddis". This might get me a lot of shit from other people, but I really don't care. This all started as part of a training exercise at a job I used to have, years ago. Now, according to Gaddis, I don't have the proper perspective on these events because I was caught up in them. That's bull. I know exactly what was going on, mainly because this was a microscopic event in the grand scheme of things, and only affected me.
So. I've got this program I have to learn how to use. I'm quite knowledgable (I know I spelt that wrong) in Computer-ese, and at the time, was considered pretty good in the company for know-how related to computers. So. I go to learn this program. I figure out most of the little stuff I need to know (i'm only using this so I can test & validate my companies software with their product). There was one feature I couldn't figure out. So I went to a help-screen, and this little bulldozer started driving around the screen, "leading me" to where the function was located. Great, but I already knew where the function's button, I didn't know how to make it work. After futzing (technical term) with this damnable bulldozer for what seems like eternity (in reality it was more like half an hour), I gave up and loaded the program up on the PC I had sitting next to the mac. Same software, different platform. So, I boot it up, run the app, and lo-and-behold - the help page is concise, and tells me exactly the information I need to know to get the function to work - and the information is non-platform specific, so it solved my frustration. Time spent? Five minutes.
Now. There's hundreds of videos online with "Mac vs. PC" or "Problems with Macs" - some have genuine issues, some, not so much. But, there's one that I've found funny and mostly true - mostly because the few limited times I've used a Mac, I've run into almost all of the problems this guy is describing. I don't know how to "embed" the video into the blog, but anyways, here's the youtube link. You don't have to like it, but please, watch it all the way through. If you're a PC user, you'll sympathize with the guy. If you're a Mac user, at least you should appreciate his snarky humor!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtZKp8_jOHo
So. About this Gaddis fellow. His book wasn't nearly as difficult or time consuming as I'd thought. Actually, it's pretty interesting, and sufficiently short so it didn't cut much into my precious, once-a-year vacation! (I only really take one Saturday off a year from teaching kids, and this was it).
I'd really like to comment on the first two chunks of the book - I liked the whole thing (though I've still got a few pages left to go, like 10 or so), but the first two bits seemed to make the biggest impression on me. The first was about his perspective of scale, and as I mentioned earlier, his concept that travelling in a time machine would suck. As soon as you "landed" at your destination time, you'd be screwed by real life - disease, working for food, being burnt as a witch or heretic, or getting blown up in a battle...all suckage that would happen if you were stuck in a microscopic (real scale) vantage point of history.
He claims that working with historical references is clearer, because you're not stuck with the clouded and muddy view from the bottom - that you can see the course of events without being troubled by the tiny nuisances of living in that time period, and instead can focus your efforts on understanding and analyzing the trend, flow, and course of history.
That's a pretty interesting notion, because I'd always seen movies and thought "Yeah, it would be fun to travel back in time to _____ and see that happen" or "Man, I'd love to take a _________ back to ________ and totally change everything". The problem with that, though, is that it would be impractical. Going back to any date to see something would inevitably, by nature of directly observing it, change it, with potentially disaterous results. That's something Gaddis goes on about (with good cause) - the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, which is another bit that he tied into his theories on Historical perspective, as before, I'd only really considered it a scientific principle (as in, quantum physics science).
Also, I really respected how Gaddis re-evaluated the nature of historical inquiry - and how he breaks down science into two categories - those which can be repeated in a laboratory, and those which require iterations of "thought experiments." This was another fairly interesting paradox for me, because I always considered history different, and possibly superior, to the "hard" sciences, for that very reason. When a Stanford (I think?) Student replied to a question with "Shouldn't we ask ourselves which sciences are historical?" it also provoked a few minutes of thought - some sciences are historical, relying on evidence left behind to piece together a cohesive picture, whereas other sciences are more conceptual, relying on observed data (like galaxy movements), and thought-type experiments to draw conclusions about the nature, and their idea of the "cohesive picture". Historical analysis is in fact both - we rely on the information and "footprints" left behind by past generations to form ideas and concepts. These "footprints", whether in the form of letters, maps, or historical accounts, give us a very good, but very limited account of the whole story - and often, human behavior can only be explained through stepping back from the microscopic, and seeing the interrelations between often disconnected events.
Wow. I hope that mostly made sense. Oh - I read a really good book recently (over the summer) it was Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" - I think the GMU bookstore has it in paperback for 10 or 15 bucks, and for the price, it's a really good, fun read, especially if you're quasi-into computers. It's set in the near future, when corporations have divided up and run their own little chunks of the USA. His other really popular work, "Cryptonomicon" is a lot more down to earth, but equally (if not more so) exciting. I just had more fun reading snow crash :)
Anyways. Yeah. Laptop in 9 hours!! For the money a good laptop costs ($500+), I could build a desktop PC that would blow away almost any PC that anyone at mason has. We're talking dual core 2.6ghz amd, 2-4 gigs of ram, bleeding edge video card, and at least 600gb of hard drive space. Unfortunately, that rig would be a little bit of a pain in the ass to haul around mason, I'd have to turn it into a C.O.W - and that would make it harder to use in my room :) I know it's not "uber-spec" but it would be a pretty ferocious machine!
So, instead, I'm stuck with an slightly old-tech laptop. Though, It'll probably run world-of-warcraft just fine, and that's really the only game I ever catch myself playing. It's pretty sweet I'll have a laptop - since now I'll be able to play WoW if I get stuck at campus an hour early before class :)
I also promise I'll start responding to other people's blogs here in the near future. having just gotten back from vacation (I left on thursday) I didn't really have a huge chance to talk to people before I left. I do, kinda wish there was an easy in-typepad friends function so I could just hotlink you all without having to open up the course's site, would be kinda neat :)
~Brad
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